I was hoping to see an AOT - but they say that currently it is just interpreter + JIT. This is beneficial for compatibility but counterproductive for speed. Nevertheless, an interesting project.
I remember trying bcc’s Java compiler years ago, and it was significantly slower than standard JITted Java, but maybe better systems exist.
I'd personally always bet on AOT performance to beat JIT - to convince me otherwise is what I would require evidence for.
As a counter-point to your argument, consider a highly dynamic language such as JavaScript, in particular the '+' operator. An AOT compiler would have no choice but dispatch to a generic heavy implementation that could handle any possible combination of inputs. On the other hand a JIT compiler can observe the runtime values used and specialize using Inline Caches, potentially down to just a few instructions.
The time spent optimizing is more than enough when you can focus the resources for the actually relevant parts.
It's some evidence. Perhaps the HotSpot thing outperforms AOT on its own, it could be true.
Somewhat equivalent to HotSpot but in AOT would be GraalVM's profile guided optimization. If runtime information is what brings JIT its advantage, then PGO could bring the same advantage to AOT. I don't have any hard data though.
From GraalVM team themselves, https://youtu.be/sI-zXYLKzfk
For what its worth, there is a vendor that uses LLVM as a JIT compiler (Falcon), but that really is not the bottleneck in most java applications.